I am beginning to wonder, if in the quest to finish our new dining room table, I am going to end up with a husband who we will nickname stumpy, or lefty or some other moniker that describes someone missing pieces of their body. Although beautiful and exotic, jatoba (brazilian cherry) shares the properties of, oh, say, CONCRETE! Depending on which resource you frequent, it is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 125% harder than oak. What this means to us:

While installing the underlayment of plywood to the bracing he broke (yes, broke) 9 screws – the screws he described as his “biggest most mac-daddy suckers.” Now, I’m no wood worker, but when you describe something as ‘mac-daddy’, I get the impression it is not exactly on par with the wood screws that I have in my Do-It-Herself toolkit.

Don’t even get me going on the hand-to-hand combat that was required in order to get the router and the surface planks to play nice together. I keep having these visions of those old boxing cartoons where the big Ukranian stands with chest puffed out and hands on hips while the little guy pummels away fruitlessly. Steve & router=little guy; Big Ukranian=table

Steve has assured me, from the very beginning of this project, that the table will be light enough for two people to carry, and would be built such that we will be able to move it both into and out of the dining room. When, today, he began talking about building a mechanism that will allow him to move the tabletop around while he is working on it, I became increasingly concerned that my requests were not going to be honored. The joke has already been raised that it is unclear if we would be crushed by it or saved by it if we were to hide under it during an earthquake.

So, next up is renting an air compressor and nailgun (no, he was not able to talk me into buying one for this project). Being that he is using wood floor plank as the tabletop surface, he decided to quiz the folks at the lumber yard as to their experience with installing the flooring. In their expert opinion, it is *to be expected* that 1 in every 5 nails will probably not penetrate the wood. I have one word for you: explosives.

For any of you who are wondering, yes, we have insurance.